CHAPTER
The Power of Voice Inflection
Zig
I do not exaggerate with this statement: any salesperson today who does not have their own cassette recorder has not fully gotten into the profession of selling. I cannot conceive of a salesperson who does not have their own recorder-player.
If you record your presentation, it will make a substantial difference in your productivity. If it is possible with all of the fancy little mics nowadays, have somebody out in the car or in another office recording your talk while you’re presenting to a prospect.
If you can’t do it that way, then by all means get in a training situation and record your entire presentation. Record the way you handle objections. Record the way you make the appointment. Record the way you do everything in the process of selling, and here’s what you’re going to discover.
You’re going to discover that what you say and what you tell your sales manager that you’ve been saying are two entirely different things. I’m going to suggest that you take that recording and script it. As you write out what you have recorded, you’re going to be astonished at some of the things you discover.
For example, you’re probably going to discover that you talk too much. That’s one of the things that a lot of people are a little shocked at. The second thing you’ll discover is that you often hear what the prospect say but are missing what that prospect is saying.
You often give non-answers to objections and miss a lot of closing opportunities. You and/or the prospect will often go off on tangents which are absolutely incredible. In long interviews, here’s what you discover: You get into a monotone. Your enthusiasm begins to die, and it really does make a difference in effectiveness.
I know what a lot of people say: “Now, wait a minute, Ziglar. The way I sound on recording and the way I really sound is not exactly the same.” Oh, I have news for you. It really is.
When you yourself listen to what you say, it sounds different, because the sound is literally coming through bone. Now I’m not calling you a bonehead; I’m just saying it comes through bone. When you record what you say, it comes back through the air, and that’s where the difference comes in.
I’m going to suggest that first of all you record one sentence: “I did not say he stole the money.” This is eight simple words, but when you use your voice properly, that simple sentence can say eight entirely different things. You need to record the sentence until your friend or your wife or husband or your manager can clearly identify all eight of the things that it’s saying.
First of all, “I did not say he stole the money” is simply a statement of fact, but by changing the inflection you can make it say something different. “I did not say he stole the money.” Totally different. Or “I did not say he stole the money.” I’ll admit it, I implied it, but I sure didn’t say it. Or “I did not say he stole the money.” That’s the rascal who got the money right over there. Or “I did not say he stole the money.” He was going to put it back in a couple of years. I mean, he just was borrowing it. “I did not say he stole the money.” It was this other money over here. Or “I did not say he stole the money.” The rascal got her jewels, that’s what it was.
The way you say what you say does make a difference. Now let’s look at your inflection as it relates to price. Have you, for example, ever had somebody say, “Well, your price is a little out
Now in “Secrets of Closing the Sale,” and in our audio series, we spend ninety minutes on voice inflection as it relates to price. Price alone. That’s kind of like hitting a fly with a sledgehammer, but when we get through, that sucker’s dead, I guarantee it. He’s gone. We don’t deal with him anymore.
Different prospects will give you that price objection in different ways. Sometimes a prospect says, “That price is ridiculous.” That’s pretty strong, isn’t it? Others say, “Well, the price is a little high.” When they give you the objections with different tones of voice, you really do have a different situation. You do not handle them in exactly the same way.
When a person says, “That price is ridiculous,” you repeat what they said. You lower your voice, you look them right in the eye and simply say, “The price is ridiculous?” That sounds so simple, but I can guarantee you, you will have to hear that a number of times, and you will have to practice it on your recorder a number of times before you get it exactly right.
What I did was very simple: I moved the objection back to the prospect’s side of the table. Now the prospect has to defend his statement versus your having to justify the price. There’s a dramatic difference in the results.
Ladies, you’ll be delighted to know that this works beautifully at home. For example, you might have had a tough day at the office or at home. You’re home when you husband gets in, and as he walks in, you of course greet him warmly and affectionately; that’s standard operating procedure. Then, when he recovers, you look at him and say, “Honey, did you want to take me to Farfallo’s or Papillon’s for dinner this evening?”
Now he might have had a tough day too. He might look right back at you and say, “I don’t want to take you anywhere to dinner.” You don’t argue with him. You just lower your voice and say, “You don’t want to take me to dinner?” It almost ain’t fair, I’ll tell you.
Voice inflection—we use it everywhere. For example, it might be grass-cutting time, and you might say to your son, “OK, son. Time to cut the grass.” That sixteen-year-old might say, “I don’t want to cut the grass.” You just look at him and say, “You don’t want to cut the grass, son?” It is absolutely astonishing, the difference in effectiveness when you use that approach.
It might be time for your son to start doing his lessons, so you say, “OK, son, time to cut the TV off and get your lessons.” He might say, “I don’t want to get my lessons.” You lower your voice, you look right at him and say, “You don’t want an education, son?” A lady the other night said, “Won’t that make him feel guilty?” I said, “Yes.”
I don’t know where we got the insane idea that we’re never supposed to feel any guilt. Did you know that if there weren’t guilt feelings, we would have license to rob, murder, rape, steal, kill, do everything? A little guilt is not a bad thing to have. It’s a must if we’re going to stay in a civilized society.
Once in a while, you’ll have a prospect who will look at you and say, “It seems to me that price is a little high.” You might simply look at him and say, “Let me ask you, Mr. Prospect, every once in a while, don’t you think you deserve something that is just a little high?”
It’s amazing what something like that will do. Why not treat yourself once in a while? You deserve it.
Another prospect might say, “It seems to me that the price is a little high” when you have a very limited amount of time. One of the most effective, one of the most powerful closes I think I have seen yet is this one. You simply lower your voice as you look at the prospect and say, “Well, you know, Mr. Prospect, many years ago our company made a basic decision. We decided that it would be easier to explain price one time than it would be to apologize for quality forever. I’ll bet you’re glad we made that decision, aren’t you?”
Does that sort of thing work in the real world? Ab Jackson, an insurance representative in Tucson, Arizona, said to me, “Zig, one night I was on my way to the biggest sales opportunity I’d ever had. The proposal I had, if the prospect bought, was worth twice as many dollars in business as any contract I’d ever written. But I was really dragging bottom. I was listening to this recording of yours on my way out, and I heard those words. I got down to the close after I’d made the proposal, and the prospect dogmatically said, ‘That price is too high.’
“I did almost it with a little twist at the end,” which you have to do in sales; you have to alter the situation a little to fit your specific need. Ab Jackson lowered his voice. “I looked the prospect right in the eye and said, ‘Mr. Prospect, many years ago, the founders of this company made a very important decision. They decided that it would be easier to explain the price one time than it would be to have to apologize for lack of service on claims and benefits forever. Deep down, Mr. Prospect, I have an idea that you’re delighted that they made that decision.’” Ab said he got awfully quiet for a few seconds. Then the man said, “You’re right. I’ll take it.”
The right words, the right intentions, the right voice inflection, the right concept behind you will really make a major difference. Sometimes, however, after you’ve answered one, two, three, four objections, the prospect might say, “It doesn’t make any difference what I bring up. You have an answer for everything.”
At that particular point, you’re that close to making the sale, or you’re that close to missing it. What you say and the way you say it is going to make the difference. If you modestly admit after a compliment like that that you were number one in the region that month and the month before, then you have just fed your ego. That’s really all that’s going to happen.
If you want to make the sale, if you want to get you out of the way and let your product and your persuasive ability take over so that you can benefit that prospect by selling them, then you lower your voice, you look him right in the eye, and you say, “I really appreciate that, and I’m going to take it as a sincere compliment, but the truth is there are many questions I do not have the answer for. That’s one reason I’m so excited about selling the product, which is the answer to your needs, and that’s really what you want, isn’t it?”
I’ll say it again. The right product, the right words, the proper inflection, and most importantly, the right intent, and you have a successful, professional salesperson.
I’d like to share an example of how this can be put together in an effective presentation. About ten years ago, I was passing through St. Louis, Missouri. I had a little time to invest, and so I was down at the carousel close to where the shoe-shine stand is, and I needed a shine, so I walked up to the little area there where they shine shoes, a very small room.
All four of the guys in there shining shoes were busy. There were no more chairs, so I stood at the entranceway. In a couple of minutes, the young man in the third chair finished shining, and his prospect put his paper down as he climbed out of the chair.
The young man pointed to me and said, “You’re next.” I climbed up in the chair and sat down. The young shoe shiner finished the cash transaction with his customer, and while he was doing that, I was looking at the prices. At that time, the regular shine was 75 cents, the wax shine was $1, and the spit shine was $2. I looked at it carefully and said, “I’ll get the 75-cent shine, tip the guy a quarter, and I’ll be on my way.”
The young man, whose name was Johnny—I know, because he had his nametag on—came over and looked at me, and he said, “What kind?”
I said, “I’ll take the regular.”
He took a step backward, looked up at me, and said, “Regular?” Should have known then I was in for an unusual shoe shine, but I wasn’t about to let that dude get the best of me, so I said, “Yes, you guys do such a fantastic job, and I’ll be on my way in a matter of minutes.”
He never said a thing, never even grunted. He just reached over and he got the saddle soap to clean the shoes with, and he quickly put that all over both shoes. Then he took the drying cloth and dried my left shoe. As soon as he finished drying it, he ran his fingers over the leather, and he had them squeaky clean. You could hear them squeak from a block off. He said, “Man, these are really nice shoes.”
I said, “Thank you very much.”
“They’re Ballys, aren’t they?”
“As a matter of fact, they are.” He said, “Don’t they cost a lot of money?” I said, “Oh, brother, do they ever cost a lot of money, but I do a lot of work on my feet, and I really need comfortable shoes.”
“I bet they are comfortable, aren’t they?”
“They are really a comfortable pair of shoes.”
By then, he had finished drying the shoes off, and he reached over to get the polish to put on them, but before he did, he reached up and he grabbed my pant leg, and he said, “That is the most unusual piece of cloth I think I have ever felt.”
It is an unusual cloth. My good friend Doyle Hoyer from Fort Madison, Iowa, who sells me my clothes, says this cloth comes from Ireland. He guarantees it’s going to last me at least five years. I believe it will, because I’ve already been wearing it a couple of years, and I can’t even tell that it’s not a brand-new suit.
Johnny said, “What kind of suit is it?”
“It’s a Hickey-Freeman.”
“Man,” he said, “those dudes do cost money.”
“Yes, they’re not inexpensive. The cloth on this one made it especially expensive, but I’m convinced I have a real good buy.” I ended up wearing that suit nearly ten years. I had the lapels altered so it fit, and after about eight years, I put a new lining in it, but other than that, it was a beautiful suit all of that length of time. I was sharing how sold I was on the suit, and he was shining away.
I don’t know how much you know about shoe shining, but let me give you one little basic fact about it. When you hear that cloth popping, that popping has nothing whatever to do with the shining. That is merchandising. That is sales talk, and I’m in favor of that. All the way, I’m in favor of it. He’s trying to attract a crowd from outside to come in and see what’s going on.
Well, he was just a-shining and a-popping. All of a sudden, between pops he stopped, he backed away, he looked right into my eyes and said, “You know, it just seems like a shame. A man will spend over $100 on a pair of shoes. He’ll spend several hundred dollars on a suit of clothes, and all he’s trying to do is look his best. Then he won’t spend another dollar to get the best-looking shoe shine in the whole world to top all the rest of it off.”
I said, “Spit on them, man, spit on them.”
Now I don’t know how you are, but when I get a 75-cent shine, a two-bit tip is all right, but who ever heard of a two-bit tip on a $2 shine? Folks with class just don’t do things like that, so I took a dollar to go with the two, and I handed it to him, and man, I go walking out of there. You’re talking about a high-stepper. Old Zig is picking him up and putting them down, thinking, “What in the world is this guy doing shining shoes?”
Then I looked up at the clock, and the clock showed straight up and down 10:00. It clicked as I looked. When I sat down, it had clicked three minutes to 10:00. I was in his chair three minutes. I gave him $3. Now, you do not have to be a Phi Beta Kappa from MIT to figure that one out. That is $60 an hour. That is $480 a day.
I know what you’re thinking: “Yes, but, Ziglar, you and me both know that he doesn’t make $480 a day.” I know that. Cut in half in two. Make it $240. Cut that half in two. Make it $120. Cut that half in two. Make it $60; $60 a day figures out to be over $18,000 a year, but I guarantee you that dude is making over $30,000 a year shining shoes. He’s good. He’s real good, but let’s not get confused here.
The reason he’s doing that is, number one, he is a professional salesperson, one of the best I have ever seen. He’s good. He goes out after business. When things are slack at his stand, he goes out into an area 100 feet away, and he starts bringing people in. He delivers what he sells. When he sells that shoe shine, he delivers every bit of it.
You know, I personally believe our rate of divorce would decline about 95 percent if we delivered in marriage what we sell in courtship. I believe our sales careers would catapult forward if we would deliver everything that we sell, keep our promises.
Johnny was a professional. He’s the only shoe shiner I have ever seen who had a name tag. It just had “Johnny.” I asked him his last name. He said, “I’m not going to tell you. If I do, you’ll forget them both, but you’ll never forget Johnny.” He also had a title: shoe-ologist.
There’s a sequel to this story. I was back in there a couple of years later. I walked by the stand. There was nobody else there, not another customer, not another guy shining shoes. I walked in, I hung up my bag, and Johnny said, “Have a seat.”
When I sat down, I noticed they’d changed the prices. A regular shine was $1. They no longer had the wax shine, and they changed the name of the spit shine to the best shine, so when I sat down, he said, “What kind?”
Well, I didn’t want to go through that again, so I said, “Give me the best.”
I found out a long time ago that people work better with praise than any other way, so I started expressing my appreciation for Johnny as a professional. I said how good he was and how wonderful it was to see somebody enthused about their work and to take such pride in it. He acknowledged those compliments, and since nobody else was there, he just kept shining. He’d put the polish on and shine, he’d put it on and shine. Finally I had to say, “Johnny, I’ll tell you, I have to go.”
So he finished up, beautifully, and as I stepped down he said, “You know, you’ve been asking me a lot of questions. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”
I said, “No. Go right ahead.”
“I can’t help but notice that you have hung an overnight bag there.”
I said, “Yes.”
“Does that mean you’re going to spend the night in St. Louis?”
“Yes, I am.”
He said, “Do you, by any chance, have another pair of shoes in that bag?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I do.”
“You know, it’d really be a shame to have the best-looking shoe shine in St. Louis tonight and look like one of the guys tomorrow. It won’t take me but a minute, and you’ll be on your way.” I left $5 with that dude that time.
Do you believe I was upset when he wanted to shine my other pair of shoes, or do you believe I was tickled and delighted that he had asked for the business in the way that indicated that he wanted me to look good to the public?
There are some significant lessons we can learn from this story. Number one, Johnny honestly believes he’s the best shoe shiner on the face of this earth. If you don’t believe it, you just ask him. He’ll say, “None better than me, man, nobody is better.” Incidentally, his stand now is under the restaurant, and so when you go into that airport, go there, and get that shine from Johnny.
The second lesson that he can teach us is the fact that he believes in his product. His own shoes were shined to a standstill. He was representative of what he was selling. When you looked at his shoes, you would think to yourself, “Boy, that’s the way I want my shoes to look.”
Number three—a lesson us sales professionals can learn—is he was a hard worker. When business slacks, as I indicated earlier, he goes after it, but when he is shining, he is really working at those shoes. Number four, he’s enthusiastic. All of us love to be around enthusiastic people.
Number five, he’s adaptable. On my first exposure to Johnny, he was shining a guy who was sitting there reading the paper, obviously interested only in reading his paper. Johnny said nothing to him. He let the guy do what he wanted to do. He let him read his paper. He talked to me because it was obvious I wanted to talk.
Number six, Johnny asked the prospect to buy. I’ll tell you that is significant. And the seventh lesson—he doesn’t hesitate to upgrade and add to what they already are buying.
The truth is very simple, and most of us would fit in this category: we’re calling on customers whom we’ve dealt with in the past who are currently buying from us. We have additional products to sell, and yet for whatever reason, for fear we’re going to be considered pushy, or for fear that we might lose the business we already have, we are not offering the additional services.
Don’t misunderstand that. I don’t believe every salesperson should offer every prospect or every customer everything they sell every time they go in there. But I do believe that on a regular basis, you should come in with an additional product you’re excited about, which you know your customer is buying from someone else, and give them an opportunity to consolidate their orders with you.
It’s not a question of selling them something they neither want nor need. You are offering them something they’re already buying, maybe of a lesser quality at a higher price from someone else. Yes, you are servicing the account. You’re doing what the professional ought to be doing.
The professional is truly a well-balanced person, one that looks at all phases of selling. This professional has integrity, he’s knowledgeable, and he’s aggressively caring in his creative approach to solving the problems of the prospect, whether that is a shoe shine they’re in need of, cosmetic dentistry they might have a use for, magnificent transportation they must have, a computer program, or an investment approach to life that makes sense. The professional does it with integrity and persistence and with the customer’s best interest at heart. That’s the sign of the professional salesperson. That’s really what successful selling is all about.